Publications

Books can be order on amazon.com.

Books

Extreme TeamsRobert B. Shaw
Managers want great teams, but most build them around decades-old ideas and practices made popular by companies that have lost their edge. Extreme Teamslooks at the new generation of teams driving growth in today’s most innovative firms. They do this by doing things differently: hiring the right person instead of the best person; focusing on one priority while leaving room to explore new ideas; creating an environment where people are comfortable dealing with the uncomfortable; and maximizing profit by not making profit what matters most.

Are you getting in the way of your own success?Leadership Blindspots is packed with detailed case studies examining how blindspots operate, using examples from firms like Apple, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, JC Penney and JPMorgan Chase. These cases show how a leader’s blindspots can lead to devastating mistakes if they aren’t recognized and acted on. Author Robert Bruce Shaw examines the most common types of blindspots and provides worksheets and assessment tools to help individuals at all levels of a company avoid being blindsided by weaknesses and threats that they don’t see or fully understand.

“Your business is either enhanced by the presence of trust or held back by the presence of distrust. Robert Shaw gives conviction and advice to the leader who recognizes that trust becomes a performance multiplier only when the leader is prepared to go first.” —Craig Weatherup, CEO of Pepsi-Cola.

If you never examined how trust affects your organization, maybe you should. In this engaging book, Robert Shaw moves past the “right thing to do” argument and focuses on trust as a critical issue successful managers cannot take for granted. He shows how lack of trust is crippling more and more organizations in today’s highly competitive environment. And he offers a way out. Drawing on a variety of examples from real business situations, Shaw explains the increasing importance of trust at four key levels: individual credibility, one-to-one collaboration, team effectiveness, and organizational vitality. He then provides an assessment survey to help you determine how you and your organization measure up trust-wise, and offers action steps for overcoming trust dilemmas such as those that arise during downsizing and reengineering efforts. A vital handbook for leaders, change agents, and anyone interested in building high trust for high performance.

Based on the authors’ ten years of consulting experience, Discontinuous Change affords a diagnostic framework for understanding, managing, and evaluating change. The book explores key issues of leadership, culture, employee motivation, and overcoming resistance. It suggests ways to sustain competitiveness by initiating-not just responding to-change.

This book presents the latest techniques for improving organizational quality, inspiring team performance, and creating powerful long-range strategy. The authors outline a proven model for understanding organizations that can be used to produce positive changes in systems and procedures.

Articles

The Essence of Discontinuous ChangeRobert B. Shaw

Radical organizational change is becoming more the norm than the exception. In many industries, competitiveness in the future will require significant shifts in a firm’s strategy, structure, work processes, culture and people. This paper outlines the basic elements of changing the fundamentals of an organization, including the development of an integrated change agenda.

Capacity to ActRobert B. Shaw

Empowerment is easier to advocate than enact. This paper examines the conditions necessary for empowerment to become an everyday reality, including modifications in an organization’s structure and culture. The role of leadership is also discussed with an emphasis on the need to delineate a clear set of business objectives and priorities.

New forms of organizational design are evolving as the global business environment forces organizations to become more competitive. This paper provides an overview of the future “look and feel” of organizations, and the process by which change will occur.

The publication Leader to Leader recently asked management consultant and author Robert Shaw to speak with Craig Weatherup, chairman and CEO of Pepsi-Cola Co., about the connections between trust, leadership, and organizational performance. One of the most demanding, results-oriented companies in the world-and one recently buffeted by competitive challenges- PepsiCo may strike some as an unlikely candidate for a high-trust culture. But, with nearly a half-million employees worldwide, the company is building a culture that offers insights into the challenge of balancing trust’s competing demands.

Organziational Bystanders: Examines the factors that produce bystander behavior in organizations, resulting in people not acting when their group is confronted with competitive threats or not acting to fully seize emerging opportunities for growth.